How would you even use 5Gbps of symmetrical bandwidth, anyway?

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Gigaclear, one of the UK's top independent ISPs, has begun trialling a symmetric 5,000Mbps fibre service for some of its existing customers. All Gigaclear customers will be able to sign up for the service in "early 2016."

Gigaclear currently provides FTTP/H (fibre-to-the-premises/home) to more than 10,000 dwellings in the UK. Unlike Hyperoptic, which has so far focused entirely on rolling out fibre in high-density cities, Gigaclear is a rural ISP. 10,000 premises is quite large for an independent ISP, but obviously it's just a tiny fraction of the 30 million or so premises in the UK. At the moment, if you're not in a handful of villages in Oxfordshire, Kent, or York, you're probably out of luck. The ISP has recently won contracts to roll out FTTP in Essex, Berkshire, and Gloucestershire, though, which should see its footprint expand dramatically over the next few years.

The rural ISP only provides a single connectivity option—a direct fibre connection to the cabinet—but there are a range of packages, starting at 50/50Mbps up/down for £39 per month. The top-tier package, symmetrical 1000Mbps, costs £72 per month for home users, or £433 per month for businesses. There's a £100 connection charge, too.

The 1Gbps service is provided via 1000BaseFX Ethernet, but it isn't clear what link layer protocol Gigaclear will be using for the 5Gbps trial. We have e-mailed the company for clarification, but haven't yet heard back. Last we checked, there wasn't an Ethernet standard for 5Gbps over fibre—but perhaps Gigaclear will use a 10GbE link layer that only runs at 5Gbps?

Updated: Gigaclear confirmed that the 5Gbps service will use a new router that has a 10Gbps fibre WAN port, and then some further 10Gbps ports for the LAN.

The pricing for the 5Gbps service is rather dear: for home users, it'll cost you £400 per month; for businesses, £1,500 excluding VAT. Such pricing suggests that either some very expensive new hardware will be required, or that Gigaclear is trying to discourage people from taking the service unless they're really sure that they need such crazy speeds.

Further Reading

Being connected to the Internet at 5Gbps is one thing, but actually being able to use 5Gbps is another thing entirely: there are almost no services on the Internet that will max out a 1Gbps connection, let alone 5Gbps. In theory, if you can find a server connected to the Internet at 5Gbps, you would be able to download a 1.5GB movie in about three seconds. This is assuming that you have a hard drive that's fast enough, of course, and that you also have a 5Gbps-or-faster LAN in your home or office.

Still, despite the lack of real-world usefulness, 5Gbps is certainly an impressive display of future-preparedness. As Gigaclear's CEO Matthew Hare points out in a press release: "It won’t be long before there’s a greater need for a 5Gbps service as connectedness becomes an ever more important part of our everyday lives. By launching the trial of this 5Gbps service now, we are showing all our customers that we are delivering a future proof network today, one which won’t need to be updated even as their usage massively increases in the years to come."

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Sebastian Anthony
Sebastian is the editor of Ars Technica UK. He usually writes about low-level hardware, software, and transport, but it is emerging science and the future of technology that really get him excited. Emailsebastian@arstechnica.co.uk//Twitter@mrseb